In the field of animal management, specifically that of laboratory animals, such as rodents, the environment inside the cages must be tightly controlled to prevent contaminations of the animals by the external environment and/or contamination of the environment and humans by the animals.
Research animals are becoming more valuable because many disease models are expensive and time consuming to develop on animals and some animals may have gone through longitudinal studies accumulating valuable long term data from experiments thus making them extremely critical to basic science research and medical device and drug development programs.
Most research institutions invest substantial resources to keep these valuable animal assets safe. A vivarium facility, including the shelving storage and the cages, is a repository where researches store their valuable animals. Individually ventilated cages (“IVC”) and rack systems are widely used for housing laboratory animals that enable a plurality of such animal cages to be arranged in a industrious and efficient manner. These systems are designed for providing a highly consistent environment across all cages on each rack.
Nonetheless, it is not uncommon for one single rack to house animals from multiple study protocols that may have different controls and environmental requirements. Therefore, there is a need for a highly adaptable caging system that can provide researchers and vivarium management flexibility to accommodate such emerging market needs on a single rack system.
Furthermore, some vivarium facilities support “long term studies”, where a “long term study” is defined as a research study that involves research animals monitored by recording devices and necessary equipment to collect data either continuously or at pre-set intervals from animals or from sensing instruments surrounding the animals. The duration of such studies may last for as little as a workday (at least 8 hours) or up to to the maximum lifespan of the animals being studied.
Cage level monitoring devices have been evaluated and sometimes adopted on limited scale for decades to provide precise measures and controls of micro-environment and, in some cases, the animals inside. The basic concept of an operant cage is almost a century old. However, deploying active monitoring on a large and industrious scale has been inefficient and challenging because of cost and reliability issues.
One challenging issue is to satisfy stringent cleaning requirements of monitoring and control equipment on large scale. Some electronic equipment is hard to decontaminate and other electronic equipment may not withstand harsh cleaning agents or methods. Increasingly, sophisticated animal models are developed with animals that have immune deficiency or multiple diseases, for example, making these animals extremely sensitive to the cleanliness of the cage micro-environment. A lot of resources are dedicated to minimize cross-contaminations between cages and cohorts of animals from different study protocols. Therefore, there is an unmet need for an efficient way to keep monitoring equipment and devices around and near each cage clean.
Many modern vivarium facilities use sophisticated technologies to provide consistently high quality of care for these valuable animal assets. Besides housing, another concern is providing quality drinking water to every cage with methods such as water packs, automated filled water bottles, and automatic watering systems. These watering methods typically are very reliable. However, their failures can cause cage flooding which may lead to animal distress or even death from hypothermia or drowning.
Therefore, there is a market need for a highly reliable and specific flooding detection and warning system to safeguard against potentially devastating loss of animal assets. Additionally, there is an unmet need for a cage provided with means suitable to automatically detect the bedding conditions in order to constantly control the environment of the cage.
Lab animal housing requirements include both reducing research variations by employing strategies to provide consistent micro-environment of the cage and monitoring micro-environments to detect unexpected issues early so that expensive and valuable animal models are not lost. Such measures mitigate outbreaks and more actively and reliably control the cage/animal parameters. As research animals become more valuable, researchers are increasingly more interested in using monitoring equipment to extract useful data in a home cage environment.
To increase capacity and quality for monitoring these valuable research animals, there are some basic needs such as water quality, safety to animals, and a direct control of the cage environment by monitoring both excessive water indicating cage flooding, and the bedding condition providing objective metrics for determining when to replace soiled bedding.